New Python type checker stops typos.
Also licensing rules and a $167M oopsie.

Typing in Python: The Quest to be Faster Than Lunch

The cycle of life in the Python community continues, new tools arrive to fix the old tools, which were only created to fix the tools before them. Today’s tool is Ty, a new Python type checker from Astral, the team that already made your linter and package manager faster; it is, predictably, built with Rust.

Initial reports suggest Ty is "extremely fast," claiming speeds up to twenty times faster than the venerable MyPy on large repositories; some developers reportedly thought the check failed because it finished so quickly. This dramatic speed increase is highly crucial because, as a community, we now spend less time waiting for the type checker and more time writing the complicated, dynamically-typed code that requires the type checker in the first place. The project is currently in a pre-alpha stage, which means it may still be incorrectly flagging sixteen hundred diagnostics that other tools miss, but speed is a feature, and correct behavior is merely an emergent property we can address later.

The AI Code Editor You Can Use Like a Video Game

Zed, the self-proclaimed fastest AI code editor, has been updated and everyone is talking about the latency. The editor is written in Rust and uses a GPU-accelerated rendering framework, essentially treating the text on your screen like a high-performance video game to ensure input latency is minimal. This engineering focus guarantees you get 120 frames per second of crisp, low-lag text input, which is a great comfort when the embedded AI assistant then takes fifteen seconds to hallucinate a useless block of code.

It is nice to know the window in which we type our boilerplate is optimally performant; however, we all still run slow Language Server Protocols and various third-party plugins in the background, which is where the actual delays live. A few veterans lamented that developers are constantly focused on shaving off tiny milliseconds from the editor frame rate instead of delivering genuinely novel features, but who has time for novelty when a new build just dropped that promises to be 10ms faster.

Licensing Drama and the Cost of a Bad Security Review

Engine developer Unity is facing some predictable community backlash for what one developer termed a double standard regarding open-source licensing. The core of the problem involves the LGPL; Unity has banned third-party assets like VLC for Unity from its store because they contain LGPL dependencies. The amusing part is that Unity’s own engine and the compiled games it ships already rely on a selection of LGPL-licensed libraries. A company is technically allowed to use a stapler, but their employees are not; you do the math.

Meanwhile, the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group was ordered by a jury to pay a $167 million fine for a security breach that infected users of WhatsApp with its Pegasus software. A corporate security oopsie of that magnitude is usually reserved for that time I accidentally set the database password to "password123", but the number here is much larger; at least NSO Group has a clear business model, which is refreshing.

Briefs

• Enterprise Chat: Mistral has launched Le Chat, an enterprise-grade AI assistant that can run on-premises. This means your new virtual coworker can finally escape the cloud and reside in the server closet next to the blinking Cisco switch; a fitting end for AI.
• Postgres Acceleration: Developers are excited for Postgres 18 and its Asynchronous I/O capability, which is expected to accelerate disk reads. The main database is finally allowed to chew gum and walk at the same time, we've only been waiting twenty years.
• The Ghost Economy: California colleges are facing a new problem called 'ghost students,' a massive operation involving fraudulent enrollment to steal financial aid funds. The students are not real, but the financial aid money is, which is the purest form of optimized bureaucracy I have ever witnessed.